The invention concerns a method for the course control of marine vessels over ground in accordance with the preamble to claim 1, in particular for the course control of ships.
Such a method provides for the manual or partly automatic input of a course line, i.e. the route of the ship, which the marine vessel, such as a ship, should adopt, without the use of prepared computer data from an electronic navigational chart or the like. In addition, an autopilot is needed, which can control the ship automatically on a desired course, as well as a position receiver system, for example a position receiver on the market, which constantly determines the momentary actual position of the marine vessel, such as a ship.
A determination of the desired course line over ground would be possible by the input of geographical coordinates from a navigational chart into a computer, in which respectively two coordinate data are determined and fed in to establish a particular position point.
On the course of the marine vessel, such as a ship, which is determined by these geographical coordinates, also named course over ground, the marine vessel is guided by means of a course control unit. A course which is determined by such coordinates consists, as a rule, of a plurality of course segments.
Such a course control unit is offered throughout the world by many firms. It is controlled by the geographical coordinates of the course over ground which is determined. On the basis of these data, a course error computation is carried out, the course is then fed into the autopilot, which corrects this error for its part. This process is costly because of the method of the determination of coordinates on a course planning medium for the definition of the course line over ground.
A normal autopilot only controls the course of the ship through the water. With an existing drift, the ship is laterally displaced against the course line which is desired and determined in the navigational chart.
The invention is based on the object of designing a method in accordance with the preamble to claim 1 so that preplanning of the course line by geographical coordinates and the electronic data input, for example from an electronic navigational chart, can be dispensed with, but a course control is only carried out on the basis of a manually or partly automatic input of the course over ground, and in which a lateral drift of the ship can be determined and corrected.